Facebook backer Peter Thiel loses almost $1 billion in a month

Everyone's so gentle with Peter Thiel, the fabulously wealthy Facebook investor and hedge-fund manager. Even Bloomberg: The news service recently reported that his $7 billion firm, Clarium Capital Management, saw its funds drop 13 percent in August, thanks to a costly bet against a rallying dollar. We'll do the math, since Bloomberg was too polite: That's roughly $900 million gone in a month — a loss bigger than the paper value of his 5 percent stake in Facebook. Thiel just lost orders of magnitude more money than most of us might ever dream of making.The loss comes after a stunning track record of the firm's biggest monthly loss, beating an 11 percent drop in March 2004. Strangely, this topic went uncovered in TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's interview of Thiel on Monday. Arrington let Thiel repeat, unchallenged, his assertion that there is no bubble in technology. To which we would add: Perhaps so. But there may be a bubble in a certain hedge fund. (Photo by VentureBeat)